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Monday, 27 July 2015

Today I decided to write about my newest journal, which I called in a very simple way "The Bunny Family Journal"( A5 size). It seems like that the story of my bunnie's love for each other continues....

This was a custom order from an older client lady. She has a son and him and his wife are expecting their second baby in the first weeks of August. It's going to be a boy!

So my client, as a very proud Grandmother, ordered this journal to give as a gift to her daughter in law. I thought this is so sweet and she particularly loved my bunny journals and so we developed this concept of a 4 member family having a little picnic in the park. She said they will end up living in Texas and so she wanted some flowers from that place to be shown on the journal too. That's why I places some Lupins and other flowers.

Ashley always tells me that I have to work on my background scenes more as sometimes my pieces look too flat and then one massive bulky character stands in the middle of it all.

So this time I decided to properly sculpt all of the background first. As it was a park picnic scene, I needed to have the picnic blanket laying on some grass and to make the scene more intimidating and give a feel of a park, I added some Hydrangea bushes and a beautiful large tree on the background. Kinda made the whole scene look more zoned out from the rest of the world. This is type of spaces I like for the picnic. Little pockets of privacy :)

First thing I always consider when making clay creatures, is their eyes. I believe that eyes is the mirror of the soul and most of my artworks are looking so alive because of the eyes. So I had to make them first. The whole family is blue-eyed in real life and so I had to stick to this hue.

Now.. I am quite ashamed to put the first appearance pictures of my Bunnies on this brown clay background, because I decided to sculpt all of their naked bodies first to see where she shapes go, how to position them and so on and then to dress them up in clothes. But because they were naked and very primitively shaped, this looked like a very awkward scene. So no, I am not showing it. We have under 18-teens here :)

But here is the shot from the moment when I dressed them up! And it looks very descent. I struggled with positioning the father bunny and it was quite hard to make mother bunny's arms holding the baby. So I used some human realistic shots for reference to understand where which part of the body goes. You might be surprised hearing this, but I am very bad at human proportions. I think sculpting

human body is the hardest thing of all.

So then I needed to understand how to blend the foreground and background together. I wasn't sure I will make it successfully with paints, so I decided to use my super set of eyeshadows which I love badly. It is, in my opinion, so much better than pastels. I just can't get hold of pastels still. But with these, they stick to your brush nicely, colours are very vibrant. You would always need to seal it after baking of course, otherwise some of the colour may still disappear.

Anyway, I ended up here and I was very pleased with how the colours looked like.

After adding up some details like flowers, more volume to the tree and picnic basket, I finally baked it! I knew that if I wash this in cold water to cool it off faster, the colours will fade, so I waited for it to cool naturally. After it cooled I started painting it with oil colours, first raw umber to enhance the outlines and small sculpted details, then other colours to make the grass brighter and so on. But I ended up messing it up a bit, because when I started rubbing off excess paint with wet whipes, the shadow also rubbed off. So next day I had to repaint it with acrylics. I regret that red flowers became much darker after the final painting was complete. I added some red colour, but still it wasn't as bright and vibrant as it was before baking. After all the paint was applied, I did a layer of antique gold in dry brushing technique to highlight the highest points of the journal surface and also did Guilders Paste patina effect over some places to add up more colour, definition and to brighten things up. I started to like the artwork so much more after that. It is always a big surprise what patina can do to your artwork.

So this is what I ended up with. Please enjoy and let me know what you think. I am welcoming technical suggestions on how I could improve this piece, or improve my sculpting, decorating and colouring techniques. Please, don't be shy. I would love some positive criticism!

My client really wanted the moto somewhere on the journal... "Life is Good" .. As this is something their Grandfather used to say and so this stuck as a family tradition. As I cherish family traditions a lot, I couldn't resist to agree and write it.

Tuesday, 21 July 2015

A little tip for those who need a multiple amount of small flowers or leafs on their clay journal or other artwork! I looked at Etsy stamps in metal for £9 each... Then I looked at my clay and my hands and said: "Let's do it!". Took me 25 minutes to make and bake.. But then I was stamping away with a speed of lightning and I saved some money!

You can make flowers, leaves and all sorts of other mini impressions with these.

The picture shows the nature picnic scene and I needed a lot of leafy bushes and trees. So it worked very well. YOU can make some smaller and bigger ones to add the variety and more dimension.

I glued my stamps with super glue to an old pen bottom part, but if you like you can use sticky glue dots to attach and detach multiple stamps onto one pen.

Anyways, this adds possibilities and new looks to my artworks and I couldn't just skip this without sharing.

Stay tuned to see the progress of this journal as well :) It's going to be a bunny family picnic :)

Monday, 20 July 2015

I am very glad to show you some new artworks! It took me some time to find tome for editing these pictures, but the actual journal was made in literary hours.

The story goes.. Two month ago I received an order. It wasn't urgent but I couldn't start it for so long. Praise my customers who give me all this free time and trust me so much. Sending my blessings to yo you all for your patience with my extravagant artistic habits.

So one of these last days I was walking and walking around my work desk and couldn't start the journal. I found 1000 other tasks. I know I have them anyway, but I couldn't prioritise things the way they were supposed to. So that day I cleaned the whole room so that my room and my mind are less polluted with distractions. When that was done I sat down on my chair, went on Pinterest, looked for some studio inspirations, found a wall colour I liked. Went to local DIY store and purchased some paint. Came home, moved all furniture in the middle, painted the wall... at 10 PM in the evening everything was done and ONLY THEN I sat down to my desk in the middle of all this wreckage and created this journal in literary hours. I think I went to sleep at about 01:30AM that day. When I woke up I only needed to bake and paint it. So another hour and it was done. My customer was very happy with the result and she loved the story of my struggles. She said it was completely worth the wait and adventure.

Because this raven has metallic embellishments that look like some sort of Japanese armour, I called him Raven the Samurai. My client was very pleased with the name too and said she couldn't find a better name for it. FUN!

So here are the pictures. Enjoy and let me know if you liked the story. Sorry I don't have progress pictures as this one came out so fast, I couldn't manage taking photos.